FRENCH POLITICS
689
have remained faithful to the General. It is powerful even among intelli–
gent Conservatives of the Laniel-Pinay type. It was no extremist but that
idol of the provincial bourgeoisie, Antoine Pinay himself, who the other
day complained that the French Army was out of date ("its organization
goes back to Napoleon and hasn't changed") and had much to learn
from the Swiss militia. And it is not the Communist
Humanite,
but the
liberal
Le M onde
and the Catholic
Figaro
who consistently stress the real
weaknesses of the body politic, with a ruthlessness and an intellectual
honesty hardly matched elsewhere in the world.
But though virtually everyone
is
agreed that a New Deal
is
urgently
needed, the decisive impetus will have to come from the Left, if only
because the Left is ready-in principle anyhow-to stake its political
existence on planning, State action and social change. How far the
New Deal majority, when it is assembled, will eventually extend toward
the Center and the Right depends on personal and political variables
which cannot be calculated beforehand.
If
the moderate reformers who
are now staking everything on a final experiment in classical liberalism
refuse their cooperation, the New Dealers may have to fall back tem–
porarily on Communist support; but on the whole it seems more likely
that the majority will stretch from the Socialists, via the Catholic labor
unions and their parliamentary allies, to the left wing of the Radicals,
and to the Gaullists-if there are any left in
th~
next Parliament. For
on the whole it seems likely that we shall have to await the general
election of 1956 before the promised "regrouping" takes effect.
When that time comes the issue of "neutralism" versus "Atlantic–
ism" will, it is to be hoped, have been settled without causing a major
breach either between America and Europe, or among those Frenchmen
who believe with equal conviction that France must remain in the At–
lantic camp, and that the country needs a New Deal.
It
would be a
misfortune
if
the Atlantic cause were to become allied to a timid and
reactionary outlook which denies France the opportunity of meeting the
modern challenge, both at home and in North Africa; just as the New
Deal will fail if-like Leon Blum's experiment in 1936-37-it associates
itself with pacifist daydreams. Fortunately there are signs that the public
mood is in many ways tougher and more realistic than it was before
the war: so much so that on occasion the visitor to France is tempted
to wonder whether Britain is not on the whole more urgently in need
of an awakening than the storm-tossed country across the Channel.
